Sunday, January 18, 2015

The Yorkshire Post lists the cultural highlights of the year in Yorkshire. Including the revival of Northern Ballet's Wuthering Heights production:

Wuthering HeightsWith an original score by celebrated composer Claude-Michel Schönberg, known for his West End and Broadway hits Les Misérables and Miss Saigon, Northern Ballet brings Emily Brontë’s romantic and emotionally-charged masterpiece to life on stage. Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield, March 18 to 21.

Paul Whitington in The Irish Independent disagrees with the selection of Wuthering Heights 2011 as one of the best films of this decade:

Of course, all 'best of' lists are ultimately subjective, but while I agreed with a good number of Mr [Peter] Bradshaw's choices [in The Guardian], I found some of them a little baffling. He was full of praise, for instance, for Andrea Arnold's 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which started with the novel premise of casting a black actor as Heathcliff. But that turned out to be a right-on gimmick in a film that sucked all the poetry and Gothic splendour out of Emily Brontë's novel, and left us with something that seemed like a depressing episode of EastEnders.

dna (India) interviews Chinese writer Anchee Min, who remembers a curious fact from the days of the Cultural Revolution:

You worked in close proximity to Mao's wife, Jiang Qing or Madam Mao. Can you describe her?We were sent to Beijing to watch Madam Mao's favourite Western movies to learn the technique of filmmaking. The movie was Jane Eyre and The Sound of Music. It surprised me that these were Madam Mao's favourite movies, for they were full of human emotions. I didn't have personal contact with Madam Mao, but people who did told me that she was quite a character, hysterical. She told everyone that she was Mao's "foot-soldier". She produced eight propaganda modern operas for a billion people to watch, to be brain-washed to worship Mao. She succeeded and the movies were an effective tool. (Marisha Karwa)

As if transcribed from Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre, rallying behind "girls" at work, girl can connote a woman who has not yet secured a partner, especially past a certain age. If that woman is actually attractive, the tokenism language surrounding her performance has various daggers from which to devalue her work ranging from the example above to, if actually effective in the role – a bitch. (Jessica Gomez)